News | selophane.blog

Laid Off

I normally don’t post my personal/professional life to this blog, but I figured I’d give it a shot.

I just got laid off today due to workforce realignment/restructuring. My office laid off 20% of their staff – 4 people including me. Honestly, I’m not really upset, more relieved. Now I don’t have to worry if I will get laid off or not. Though, I now have to find a new job.

So, does anyone know of any opportunities in the DC area? My resume is on here. I’d be interested in anything architectural, graphic design, urban planning, or IT.

Sur la banquette

[Image via Trumpet.]

Today starts DesCours, New Orleans’s second annual AIA sponsored public art installation festival. For the next five days the public spaces all over the French Quarter and Central Business District (CBD) will be transformed into interactive design installations. Not only is this a cool chance to inhabit spaces by up and coming artists and designers, but local fixtures such as Rebirth Brass Band and the Trème Brass Band will be filling the spaces with sounds that are distinctly New Orleanian. This “Architects Week” on an urban scale is free and open to the public.

I wish this festival was around when I was living in NOLA. This is the kind of architectural design culture that was missing. There was Art for Art’s Sake and White Linen, but nothing that really embraced new architectural thought. I would love to see a similar concept come to DC or NOVA, we could really use a public celebration and exposure to interactive architecture installations.

LEED, the trials and tribulations of the Green Revolution

I just finished reading an article on the Wall Street Journal’s site about the green building movement and the practical issues faced with training professionals and navigating an unstable and untested market. As a design profesisonal who keeps putting off his LEED exam in favor of other equally worthy endeavors, this article hit home. The problem with green building right now is that the market is so new and untested both for professionals and for the products. The article describes a situation similar to one I recently faced at work. An architect specified a Green product that ended up not being reliably available which caused delays and impacted budget. In the end litigation was reached. Fortunately, in my situation we were able to determine that the LEED point was unattainable even with the specified product, and that we were well within our target status (silver) so a non-LEED approved solution was found which allowed the budget and schedule not to be impacted.

This type of problem is rare in proven markets, when was the last time you heard that concrete or brick was not available? And when they are not, an alternative product usually exists and can be used without detriment to the project. The problem with the current state of Green products is that in some divisions (parts of the construction trade) there may few choices that help qualify for points, and each choice can qualify for differing points, so an alternative product may be the same monetary cost but may cause you to lose LEED credits. All of this coordination (and possible legal exposure) is one of the main reasons that LEED projects demand a high premium on the design fees.

The other major reason for the premium that LEED projects (or Green projects in general) carry (besides the increasing demand) is that the supply of trained professionals is just not enough to keep up with the demand yet. The LEED exam, while well within reach for anyone who is good at wrote memorization, is a barrier for many to achieving LEED-AP (Accredited Professional) status. In my case, every time I start to study for the exam something more germane to my career comes up. The first time it was focusing on completing my IDP, now I am preoccupied with studying for my licensing exams. Once I finish those, I am sure I will be concerned with getting my continuing education credits. Now I know these don’t take up all my time, but as opposed to when I was a student, I have more pressing things to do in my free time than read and memorize a 500 page book for instant recall. I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that, yes professionals know that we SHOULD get accredited, but until it becomes a necessity of our field, or we are offered increased compensation for our accreditation, I have a had time believing that supply of LEED accredited professionals will catch up with demand.

Adaptively reused Circuit Cities, here we come!

With the recent closing of many of the area’s Circuit City stores and the bleak financial forecast, this Sunday’s Washington Post article about what to do with big box stores after they close down, seemed to be fortuitously timed to impact the local planning discourse. For this article, the Post assembled a collection of local architects and artists, such as Darrel Rippeteau, Roger K. Lewis, Esocoff & Associates, et al., and asked them how they would reuse a big-box store.

The graphics in this article are intriguing and open an sub/urban planning discussion on what to do with the trappings of early twenty-first century American development once this business model has changed. The proposals include luxury housing, gardens, vineyards, and other adaptive reuse measures. This is all green and good, but I have to question the safety and cost of reusing these big box stores. Like fast food franchises, big box stores are not built to last. They are not constructed with any concept of their permanence, instead they are meant to go up quick and cheap and come down the same way when the new mega-ultra-super mart opens around the corner. The advantage of reusing old warehouses and factories is that theses large masonry structures were built to last and much of these structure can be re-purposed for less a strenuous program. This advantage would not be present in the Circuit Cities which will soon find themselves lacking a purpose.

There was one proposal that stood out to me, instead of re-imagining the big box store, it adapted the parking lot to a more urban context. The design called for two “linear buildings” surround a “parking module.” This strategy is closely related to one of the common forms for multifamily construction – the Texas Donut. In this strategy the parking garage is surrounded by the program, hiding it from view and creating a “safe” place for parking. This is a strategy that has become quite common in urban fringe development and could be beneficial in creating density within the big box context. The other reason this strategy caught my eye is that in my Thesis project for architecture school, I repurposed the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in New Orleans to create a public plaza and a municipal library. Part of the goal of my project was to acknowledge the big box stores as the modern equivalent of the urban market and to reintegrate them into the civic context.

From Highboy to Turbine

[Image via Inhabitat.]

So it looks like Dubai is approaching its Po-Mo phase, Philip Johnson beware!

In an almost deferential move, there is a new building slated for construction that looks like a Turbine (see this post at Inhabitat). Instead of going the Masdar route and building a building that generates its power, this building just refers to the shape of turbines as a way of co-opting the green building trend and making it a design statement. In place of power generation, the “turbine” will generate spectacular views of the desert mirage that is Dubai for the dinners in its floating restaurant.
It is interesting to note that the design firm that built this project Atkins Design is responsible for many other projects in Dubai and the arab world including the Burj Al Alrab and the Jumeirah Beach Hotel. One of their projects which I have wrote about in the past is the Bahrain World Trade Center, which has three actual turbines that generate power for the building.

The reason I bring up Po-Mo and Johnson is that this project in Dubai seems such a blatant progeny of his AT&T building (now Sony building) in NYC. This building was meant to evoke the prestige and Americana patriotism of a Chippendale Highboy in the treatment of its roof line. Much like the Vana Venturi house brought post modernism to the home and hearth, Johnson’s AT&T building brought the language of Post Modernism to commercial construction. No longer were smooth glass boxes a la mode, instead references to historic forms were used to tie companies to abstract ideas and emotions.

It will be interesting to see if this new tower in Dubai will change the architectural discourse further. Instead of just buildings referring natural elements such as flames and water droplets (Champana’s Dubai Towers and The Shanghai Cruise Ship Terminal) this new building takes it a step further and refers to power that these natural elements can generate without actually generating it. This contradiction seems to say “Hey look at me, I’m cool, I’m a green product, but not really – I’m so hip I don’t need to be green.” Taking this to its natural conclusion, might we start seeing buildings decked out with “faux-to-voltaic” panels and AstroTurf green roofs? If Dubai is the new New York and considered a barometer of the commercial architectural zeitgeist, we just might.

The Panic of 2008

Check out my sister’s op-ed piece on the similarities and differences between our current political situation and the Panic of 1837 on The History News Network. Its a really interesting read.

Farnsworth House makes Lemonade out of Lemons

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which I blogged about suffering flood damages, has re-opened to special guided tours on a limited basis. These special tours will raise money for restoration and repairs and will focus on the extent of the damages caused by the flooding and the process of historic restoration. More information can be found in this press release from the National Trust for Historic Preservation or at their blog, PreservationNation.

Architecture in Crisis

In light of the recent 2 week’s financial news I have been a little preoccupied with reading the news blogs and playing fake day-trader on updown.com and have not found many articles to write about. That being said, I would like to write an extra special post detailing how an economic collapse, or at least a shaky market, will affect the architecture world as we know it. Unfortunately I do not have the knowledge or research to make any grand predictions or explanations. Instead, i will just make my own observations.

Here goes the list of things that we might see happen due to recent economic events:

Due to a decrease in speculative lending, new construction loans will become harder to get, and many private commercial projects will be tabled.
Because of the economic slow down there will be less capital and therefore less commercial growth, so the drop in commercial projects will be compounded by their being less demand. This may be beneficial to the projects that do seek financing, because there will be less fingers in the pie
Less commercial growth, in turns creates less personal disposable income and reimbursable business expenses. This can translate to a slow down in hospitality construction and restaurant and entertainment interiors jobs.
Less commerce, means less jobs, and in turn that means less of a likelihood of a turnaround in the housing market, because there will be fewer buyers with enough savings to qualify for the new restrictive loans. This will hurt the multifamily and mixed use development architects.
A smaller housing market and lower property values mean that municipalities will have a lower tax revenue stream and public use building contracts may start to dry up.
With 401(k)s and IRA’s and housing prices in the toilet, baby boomers may need to wait to retire. This means the assisted living and retirement community developers will be hit hard. On the other hand, with a graying population staying home, the suburbs will need to be retrofit to accommodate the newly elderly and infirm. Couple this with a drop in housing prices and more people finding ways to make their current houses work for their needs, and this means architects who focus on home renovations probably will see a rise in productivity.
In addition to retirement savings, college savings accounts may be hit hard. This may mean smaller enrollment numbers for private universities and larger applicant pools for state schools. In addition, tightening of purse strings equates to less donations for private universities. Together this may mean less collegiate jobs on the table, and those that are available will be for state institutions who need to expand capacity on a shoestring budget
I do think we will see growth in two other sectors beyond home renovation, they are sustainable and environmentally conscious design and institutional (prison and health care). Sustainable design will be a necessity as people look at ways to decrease their monthly expenditures. This will work in cooperation to the home renovation boom; people will replace windows for more efficient glazing, switch to tankless water heaters and solar hot water, and look at domestic energy production as ways of increasing their property value and decreasing their quotidian expenses.
Prison construction and hospital construction and/or repair and renovation will increase for two reasons. First, with recessions come crime waves (the need for more correctional facilities) and a greater demand on the health care infrastructure. With more unemployed workers, there will be less people with health care. These individuals may not seek medical treatment until an issue becomes an emergency. In addition, the stress of a recession could cause emotional trauma – depression and mental health disorders. All of this will stress the existing system. Secondly, the government may look for ways to provide labor for the unemployed, a la the WPA, and, transportation infrastructure aside, hospitals, prisons, and other larger public use projects are the best use of these funds.

Again, this is just what I see when I look at the tangled web of finance and its relationship to the profession of architecture. I am sure other people will be glad to point at the ways i am wrong.

Farnsworth House 1 Global Warming 1

[Image courtesy of the National Trust for Historic Preservation via PreservationNation.]

Today I received an e-mail from The National Trust for Historic Preservation giving me an update on the condition of the Farnsworth House, a piece of seminal modern architecture by Mies van der Rohe. The flood waters have receded, but as you can see in the above photo, there is as expected water and mud damage. The glass windows/walls are intact, as are the travertine floors; the primavera wood panels from the living room were rescued, but much of the built in wood has suffered water damage. The extent of the restoration process is yet to be determined, but because of the large scale damage clean up operations in the area the process will be slow. The full story can be found at PreservationNation.

Donations are welcomed and greatly appreciated. If you want to help, visit Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Farnsworth House is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is managed by Landmarks Illinois.

Farnsworth House 0 Global Warming 1

[Image via 33 and a Third.]

Due to unusually heavy rains and flooding caused by the remnants of Ike and Lowell, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House has 1 foot of standing water in it, according to the National Trust’s Blog PreservationNation. The house is built 5′ off of the ground, so that means there 6′ of flood water. Hopefully, when the water subsides, the damage will be able to be repaired. Donations can be sent here.

This should serve as a reminder to everyone that even though increased hurricane and tropical storm activity mainly affects the coasts, once these storms make in inland, they still drop a lot of water. As storms get stronger and more common there will be more flooding in the nation’s rivers and streams. We are all effected by global climate change.